A clinical need exists for: (1) a nutritional system comprising a delivery identification means; (2) for a method for ascertaining if a patient on nutritional support is experiencing medical problems contemporaneously with the nutritional support; and (3) for a method to ensure that a patient is receiving the benefits of nutrition.
Nutritional support is the provision of nutrients to patients who cannot meet their nutritional requirements by eating standard diets. For patients on nutritional support, nutrients may be delivered to the gastrointestinal tract enterally, using oral nutritional supplements, nasogastric and nasoduodenal feeding tubes, and tube enterostomies. Current nutritional support techniques permit adequate nutrient delivery to virtually any patient.
Nutritional support is indicated for many patients, including patients with inadequate bowel syndromes, patients with a severe, prolonged hypercatabolic status, patients with extensive burns, multiple trauma and mechanical ventilation, patients requiring prolonged therapeutic bowel rest, patients with a treatable disease who have sustained a loss of over 25% body weight, patients with a functioning gastrointestinal tract (as a supplemental oral diet), and patients with other conditions, such as neurological disorders, recovering from surgery and clinical conditions, such as malabsorption disorders associated with Crohn's disease.
Nutritional support has enjoyed wide acceptance in medicine, and it is used daily in clinics, hospitals and nursing homes. While nutritional support is used to deliver many nutrients, problems are frequently associated with its use. For example, if an attending physician detects fluid in the lungs of a patient, the physician needs to know the nature and/or the content of the fluid, and consequently sucks fluid from the lungs to ascertain the origin of the fluid, in order to prescribe a mode of treatment. To effect a treatment, it is necessary to know if the fluid is stomach fluid that has been regurgitated up the esophagus and aspirated down the trachea into the lungs, fluid from an internal bleeding source, fluid that is infectious in origin, or fluid from a nutritional support system. Nutritional support and internal nutritional support are discussed in Current Medical Diagnosis and Treatment, Lange, pp. 1104-1108 (1996); Textbook of Medicine, Cecil, pp. 1168-1171 (1969); The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, pp. 942-949 (1987); and Principles of Internal Medicine, pp. 466-472 (1994).
In light of the above presentation, it will be appreciated by those versed in the nutritional support art to which this invention pertains that a pressing need exists for means for ascertaining the presence of a nutritional support fluid administered to a patient to distinguish the nutritional support fluid from biological and infectious fluids. The pressing need exists, also, for a delivery system that delivers an identification to a nutritional support fluid that imparts a distinctive property to the nutritional support fluid.